'City of Glass 63 - (The Book is the Tower is Central Park is the dark blue of night is the Book)'

New pleasures and observations, a different wall, beautiful light, the pinks warmer, zinging, holding their own more against the dark-blue... it's a wonderful thing if a painting can continue to please, change, provoke thought over time. A days' distance from the deliberation of painting the idea...sensation:colour against colour, the intuitiveness of the placement of the large green block on the right of Central Park forming an invisible necessary horizontal with the thin red shape on the left. Above the orange, the rightness and crispness and purity and criticalness of the double-curve (in the same green), forward against the red: without it the painting would dissolve into mush. Try it - cover it up with your finger. All the horizontals and blocks/blobs/colour seem to have the right controlling weight. Ideas and intuition in sync. QUESTION: what am I looking at? ANSWER; many things....The painting is also intimidating: an artist has to do it again in the next piece..and again...'the fear and thrilll of the chase....'

MONDAY

Looking at the painting again this morning, the excitement cranking up further: The Book is Central Park is the Tower(of Babel) is the dark-blue of night is the Book. Quadruple-meanings and possibilities...the verticality of New York captured...map-view, street-view, simultaneous. The New York canyon-thing, the Book is the negative space between buildings... the organic marks a crowd, people moving through space.... Painting Truth.

SUNDAY PM

The book that inspired the series* is now in the painting, is the subject of the painting. It sits - a powerful presence, it's hard to look anywhere else. The Book is Central Park is the Book. This duality is the essence of the piece: flitting from one interpretation to another, impossible but exhilarating. The book was scraped-back and repainted several times today until I found that critical tipping-point where paint is something, gains an identity or even has the possibility of being something. One more brushstroke and the paint becomes illustrative and grabs too much attention, discordant in the language of the whole. That's why having the book title down the spine didn't work. Glazes of ultramarine and alizarin, now a convincing shape, monumental. The colours are working for me.

The Book is Central Park is the Tower (of Babel) is the dark-blue of night is the Book

Sat p.m

SATURDAY P.M

Denser, weightier blue, book-form emerging, 'side' and perpective suggested by two tiny triangles...pink onto green - love the large writhing pink-mark on the right-side- 'organic', near-rectangle, echoes the blue...hovering, coming forward, making space...Manhattan elusive - hinted at, defined? by specific shapes and proportions and the new dark angled line edging the orange, now extended...'there but not there'- the mantra for the series

It's open, ambiguous, exciting - the book/park still a slab of paint with a mere suggestion of form. To shake up the painting, I have to try putting in the title the title and author's name down the spine - another downward movement- to see if the painting looks ridiculous or, because of the source in text, it gains an edge.

Getting deeper into painting.

Sat a.m.

SATURDAY A.M

Some wilder marks on the right-side, lines of movement linking to the curves. The park/book now having a physical-presence, beginning to sqeeze out from the surround. A few horizontals to bring some order & stop the eye sliding out of the painting. The cluster of horizontals/streets, piers and blobs underneath the park/book looking interesting...

Friday

FRIDAY 24 NOV

It's good to be working again...this is the painting after the first session, on a red/orange ground. The idea has been around for a while...I saw that Central Park was the same proportions as the spine of my copy of 'The New York Trilogy' or any book. In this painting the Park will be the book, an image painted graphically, near life-size. Lets see how it sits in the language of colour and mark-making that surround it. The challenge is to make it work- the illusion of being able to grab and slide the book out but from what space?

The blue/park/book not yet right- needs to be more ultramarine. Underneath is a pink to further drag through tomorrow. It has a presence. Early days.